Josef Pieper, a Philosophical Style Eamonn O’Higgins, L.C

Josef Pieper, a philosophical style Eamonn O’Higgins, L.C. Josef Pieper is probably well-known for his book on The Four Cardi- nal Virtues , and is probably well-read by those in search of contempo- rary illustrations of the relevance of St. Thomas Aquinas in the teach- ing of personal and social ethics. There is much more to J. Pieper than this and I would like to show in what follows how this German philosopher rediscovers the real nature of philosophical reflection, as also philosophy’s essential relation to theology, an authentic and inde- pendent interpretation of Aquinas, and the philosophical style of this very literate philosopher, Josef Pieper 1. I Philosophy today is normally thought of as a particular area of technical academic endeavour. For J. Pieper, however, this popular conception of the nature of philosophical reflection is wrong on two counts. First of all, for Pieper, the philosophical perspective has much more to do with the simplicity of seeing rather than with laborious mental constructions of reason. Without denying the necessary work of reasoning, in its various forms, ‘searching and re-searching, ab- _____________ 1 I would like to thank the students of a recent seminar on the writings of J. Pieper for their insights and explanations. Alpha Omega, XVII, n. 1, 2014 - pp. 147-156 148 Eamonn O’Higgins, L.C. stracting, refining, and concluding (cf. Latin dis-currere, ‘to run to and fro’), there is a prior receptive capacity of the intellect of ‘simply looking ( simplex intuitus ), to which the truth presents itself as a land- scape presents itself to the eye’ 2. It is this ‘simply looking’ that is ‘is the first step toward that primordial and basic mental grasping of reality, which constitutes the essence of man as a spiritual being’ 3. In this sense the philosophical perspective is not something particular to technical philosophers but implies the basic search to see things, persons, and all of reality as they are, something that is within everyone’s grasp. It is for this reason that in much of his writings Pieper refers to ‘the philosophising person’ ( der Philosophiernder ) rather than to ‘the philosopher’ ( der Philosoph) . This is Pieper’s way of underlining the simple receptiveness to the widest perception of reality which is the real disposition required for philosophical perception and reflection. What Pieper means by ‘seeing’ is not just reading or the mental abstraction of concepts, but the openness to the experience of reality in all its varying modes of presence. Pieper also contradicts the notion that philosophy is a limited area of study and research. Instead, he refers to the philosophical perspective as the one that is determined ‘not to allow any element of the totality of the truth to escape us, and consequently to accept a less exact method of verifying results rather than to risk losing contact with some portion of reality’ 4. In this sense the philosophising person is one who, however cautiously, attempts to bring together and hold in unity different and divergent elements of experience. This unifying effort is something we tend to do spontaneously, if not deliberately. Unfortunately, our spontaneous synthesis of experience (the meaning we give to our lives) is often selective of experience and short-term in extension. Life teaches us that breaking open our narrow world views and the bringing together of all elements of our experience is not something easy to do. It is this openness to all _____________ 2 J. PIEPER , Leisure, the Basis of Culture, St. Augustine’s Press, Indiana, 1998, 11. Pieper explains the etymology of intellect as the reading into reality (intus leggere ) of the mind. 3 J. PIEPER , Only the Lover Sings, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990, 34. 4 J. PIEPER , Problems of Modern Faith: Essays and Addresses, Franciscans Herald Press, Chicago 1985, 4. Josef Pieper, a philosophical style 149 dimensions of experience and the ability to grasp in some limited way all these dimensions in unity that constitutes the hallmark of the genuine philosopher. There seems today to be a great difficulty in accepting perspectives other than one’s own. At the same time, a truly philosophical (and ‘scientific’) attitude recognises one’s own field of study as part of a greater whole, to which other disciplines contribute. The effort required to broaden one’s perspective and bring into a greater unity different elements of experience is considerable. It is far from a mere live and let live consensus and the acquiescence to different disciplines living in relative isolation to each other. Pieper is particularly moderate in his philosophical aims. The effort to bring into unity different modes of experience is something al- ways unfinished. He recalls that, according to a Platonic tradition, the philosopher is one who loves this unifying, universal knowledge (‘a wisdom-loving seeker after truth’), not one who possesses it. 5 Pieper rejects the ideologies that see too much and too clearly, as something unrealistic and presumptuous for man. Quoting from Goethe, Pieper refers to such thinkers as ‘these men who believe themselves capable of mastering God, the soul, and the world (and whatever other names might exist for what no one comprehends)’ 6. A little learning is indeed a dangerous thing. At the same time, the necessary modesty of our answers to the unity of life and reality is not due fundamentally to the obscurity of our experience and the consequent doubt as to the existence of any- thing or anyone beyond our own narrow perspective, but precisely the opposite, because of the excess of light that overwhelms our capacity for comprehension. The experience of something greater than our or- dinary perspective, discovering unequivocal signs of a greater reality than our own limited viewpoint, ‘the experience that the world is more profound, more commodious, more mysterious than it appears to our everyday understanding’, is the genuine attribute of the philosophising person 7. This experience implies both a sense of wonder and the confusion of something new breaking into my horizon of perception. _____________ 5 J. PIEPER , For the Love of Wisdom… 296. 6 J. GOETHE , In a letter to Zelter, October 27th, 1827, in J. Pieper, For the Love of Wis- dom …66. 7 J. PIEPER , For the Love of Wisdom …59. 150 Eamonn O’Higgins, L.C. Pieper is struck by the fact that much of modern philosophy recognises only the confusion, the uncertainty, the doubt, in this new experience, and not the wonder of the new experience of being. By the way, Pieper’s understanding of the philosophical perspective was not just an academic approach. When asked in Nazi Germany about his view of the Jewish question, and whether he agreed that by eliminating the Jews the world would then be at peace and rest, his an- swer was a categorical no, because ‘The world is simply not like that. You cannot get rest and peace simply by excluding some factor or other’ 8. This suggests that the philosophical perspective is not only an academic prerequisite, but a matter of life or death when dealing with the common good of society. It is not difficult to think of practical ex- amples today of the imposition of partial perspectives on vulnerable sections of society. II It is this understanding of the openness to and search for the universal perspective that provides Pieper with what is perhaps the fundamental leitmotif that runs through almost all of his written work. Basically he argues that if the philosophical perspective is to disregard no element of human experience, then it may not exclude from its perspective the religious experience of man, not only the experience of man’s natural openness to a transcendent God, but also the claim that such a God has in historical fact communicated with man. This may sound tendentious to many today, a dangerous confusion of mutually autonomous areas. Surely philosophy and theology are two different domains, mutually (and happily) exclusive? Reason may or may not lead to the affirmation of a transcendent God, but is it not presumptuous, to say the least, to hold that reason itself is infested with supernatural experience? Unfortunately, this is exactly what Pieper is saying, and his claim to the truth of what he says rests on two fundamental approaches. His first approach is to take the historical account of what philosophy was _____________ 8 J. PIEPER , No One Could Have Known, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, location 2298 (Kindle). Josef Pieper, a philosophical style 151 originally considered to be. Plato is his point of reference. For exam- ple, in the Platonic myths, Pieper shows that Plato meant certain myths to be taken as conveyors of truth, and that while the myths are received from the ancients, it is not the ancients who are their origina- tors; these myths are a ‘gift from the gods to mankind’ 9. Pieper’s con- clusion is that ‘the primary element in the original conception of philosophy consists of nothing other than an uninhibited relation to theology, a methodical openness in relation to theology’ 10 . He concludes with this neatly expressed bombshell: ‘At the beginning of human his- tory, as well as at the beginning of each individual biography, philosophy and theology are undivided, one. Every person who inquires after the meaning of the totality of world and existence begins as a be- liever’ 11 . Pieper’s second approach is to argue, not from the original tradition of the philosophers, but from first principles, in a manner of speaking.

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